High fructose corn syrup, a common sweetener added to sugary soft drinks and processed food, has been found to contribute to high blood pressure.

The study conducted on people who ate or drank over 74-gms of fructose per day i.e. the equivalent of 2.5 sugary soft drinks, raised their risk of developing high blood pressure, as excessive amounts of the sweetener are harmful to the body, because fat pumped into the bloodstream by the liver, can potentially damage arteries.

Sex might be fun, but the Dutch don't find it as fun as a pleasant trip to the bathroom, if survey results reported Thursday by the ANP news agency are to be believed.

According to the poll of 1,000 adults, 88 per cent listed a visit to the bathroom as something "they enjoy the most," making it the most popular activity chosen, reported ANP. Only 21 per cent did the same for sex.

The emergency services in a north-western German town were placed on high alert after two six-year-olds built a toy atomic reactor complete with radioactivity warning signs, the police said on Tuesday.

Life has been found in an ecosystem trapped underneath a glacier in Antarctica for nearly 2-million years, the microbes surviving in the dark, oxygen-free waters, by drawing energy from sulfur and iron. With some scientists believing that the Earth under went 'Snowball Earth' periods, when it was entombed in ice, these findings could serve as a model for how life might survive on icy planets like Mars, Europa, Jupiter's icy moon, and other inhospitable environments elsewhere in the galaxy.

Researchers say heart attack patients can suffer another attack, by taking Plavix, a widely used blood thinner together with heartburn drugs like Prilosec.
 
Patients are often given Plavix, also known as clopidogrel, made by Sanofi-Aventis SA and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, and aspirin for thinning the blood after a heart attack, with doctors prescribing a proton pump inhibitor, or PPI, such as AstraZeneca Plc.'s heartburn drug Prilosec to cut the risk of gastro-intestinal bleeding from blood thinners.
 

As a young girl, Elisapee Sheutiapik never wore short-sleeved shirts, but the weather in the summertime in recent years can reach 25 degrees in her hometown of Iqaluit, close to the Arctic Circle in northern Canada.

Climate change has also impacted the lives of winter hunters from the indigenous Inuit people in Canada.

"Our older hunters, who go out to the land regularly, are sometimes stuck now, and we are conducting more search and rescue missions" said Sheutiapik, the mayor of Iqaluit.

The early arrival of spring weather this year in Vietnam is due to global climate change, the head of Vietnam's southern meteorology laboratory said Wednesday.

"Normally, hot weather starts appearing in the southern provinces in March, but this year, it has arrived about one month early," said Nguyen Minh Giam, head of the Southern Regional Hydrometeorological Centre's Forecasting Department in Ho Chi Minh City.

An earthquake measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale shook parts of northern Pakistan Friday, a Meteorological Department official said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

The epicentre of the quake, which struck at 8:49 am (0349 GMT), was 95 kilometers north-east of the capital, Islamabad, department chief Qamaruz Zaman Chaudhry said.